Tag Archives: George Marsden

Yesterday, I had my review of George Marsden’s book The Twilight of the American Enlightenment published on the Web/Email Forum Public Discourse. Public Discourse is concerned about many things, but one of them is religion in public life. This review gave me a chance to reflect on this topic.

Also, publishing with Public Discourse was fun, for two reasons. First, George was my graduate school advisor, so I was happy to promote his book, as well as ask some probing questions of it–and about American life. Second, during my time in Princeton I had a chance to get to know the folks at Public Discourse. It seemed a natural fit to send this piece their way.

Read the whole piece, but the nutshell is that this is an interesting book both as a history of the “middlebrow” ideas and religious sensibilities of the 1950s and as a reflection on how American culture today should deal with religious differences. Marsden is inspired by Dutch theologian Abraham Kuyper and the vision of “principled pluralism.” Generally, I think this could be promising, but it would also require lots of people to buy in–something I don’t see happening at this time.

In this one, I spring-board off of discussions of George Marsden’s new book (read my quick review here) to raise the larger point about about the dilemma of religious authority in America.

As I demonstrate in a brief sketch, religious authority has been something Christians in America have been wrestling with for a long time–at least back to Jonathan Edwards, although one could make the argument it goes back to Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams.

Tocqueville, From Wikimedia Commons

To my mind, understanding Tocqueville is an important piece of this dilemma. Tocqueville saw with great insight the challenges confronting any authority, including religious authority, in a society whose first passion was democracy.

Marsden is one of the leading historians of American religion–and, for purposes of disclosure, my graduate advisor. He has previously published award-winning books on Fundamentalism, religion and the university, and most recently, Jonathan Edwards.

In this new book he jumps back to the twentieth century to examine, as the subtitle has it, “The 1950s and the Crisis of Liberal Belief.”

In Marsden’s account, “liberal” in the 1950s was used as a centrist term, for the rational, open-minded approach to the world favored by the cultural mainstream. This liberal outlook, Marsden contends, continued to embrace the empirical, rationalist values of the American Enlightenment, which dated back to the eighteenth century. Such an approach favored a unified cultural outlook that had little room for diversity. Religiously, it embraced a liberal Protestantism, which remained institutionally close to the levers of cultural influence.

Although culturally confident in the 1950s, this dominant approach was actually on its last legs. It was maintaining its optimism and intellectual categories, while the under-girding belief system was dissipating. It was thus set for a rapid decline with the cultural and intellectual upheavals of the later 1960s. That era would produce approaches that would undermine easy confidence in rationality, the authority of science, individualism, and cultural consensus–all factors of the cultural confidence of the ’50s. As consensus culture shattered, it produced many subgroups, but with no coherent ideal to keep them together. The end result was to set intellectual trends that remain to this day.

Another result was secularism. The shattered coherence sidelined liberal Protestantism, replacing it not with another set of beliefs but with no religious belief. The end result was a dominant form of secularism. As Marsden had, in the Soul of the American University, chronicled this secularization in higher education (from established Protestantism to established non-belief), so now he traces it on a broader cultural level.

In his conclusion, Marsden echoes a strategy that has become a trademark: he steps back from his subject to consider how the historical account can help us (collectively) think about contemporary issues. He argues for the need for a principled pluralism. He criticizes how both evangelicals and secularists seem unable to come to terms with pluralism, to make a place for genuine difference in the pursuit of the common good. Instead, he offers a helpful contrast to the work of Abraham Kuyper in the Netherlands at the turn of the twentieth century. Kuyper, although deeply Reformed in his thought, made an intentional place for cultural and religious differences. That the Kuyperian option never really appealed to American thinkers is also a legacy of American interpretations of enlightenment.

Throughout, the writing is done gracefully, and complex issues are treated clearly. This is an engaging and accessible book for anyone willing to think through important issues.

Finally, I can’t resist one historiographic note. There’s been much recent discussion of Molly Worthen’sApostles of Reason, which highlights the problem of authority among neo-evangelicals who claimed authority from Biblical sources but still needed interpreters or organizational leaders. On the other hand, Marsden suggests that there was simultaneously a crisis of authority among liberals and modernist Protestants. Put together, the two books could highlight a very real theme about issues of authority in democratic America. I definitely think the two could be read profitably alongside each other.

In any case, the homework for each reader of this post should be to buy and then read Marsden’s Twilight of the American Enlightenment.

About Me

My name is Jonathan Den Hartog, and I'm an historian of early America, with a special interest in religion, politics, and their intersection. My current appointment is as an associate professor of history at the University of Northwestern-St. Paul, Minnesota, but this blog represents my own views and does not express the opinions of the institution.